The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Getting Played by ISIS? Welcome to the Club!

[China Matters will be
on vacation hiatus until July 14, 2014.It will be interesting to see how this piece on ISIS holds up in the
interim.Best summer wishes, and thanks
to all our readers.]

Apparently ISIS is a business, a bloody and illegal
business, sort of like the Mafia.That’s
what I gleaned from a McClatchy report by Hannah Allam on the group’s finances,
revealed at least by a trove of documents captured by the US, turned over to
RAND a few months ago, whose conclusions leaked into the public sphere today.

Mosul was the Islamic State’s fundraising nerve center for
years before the city fell to ISIS this month, according to Johnston’s analysis
of the documents. A key to understanding the city’s enduring importance to the
group comes from a Mosul “administrative emir” whose meticulous records from
August 2008 to January 2009 were seized and added to the database.

In accordance with the Islamic State’s business model,
Johnston said, cells were required to send up to 20 percent of their income
from local enterprises _ such as kidnapping ransoms and extortion rackets _ to
the next level of leadership. Higher-ranking commanders would examine the
revenues and redistribute the funds to provincial or local subsidiaries that
were in dire straits or needed additional money to conduct attacks.

The records show that the Islamic State was dependent on the
Mosul members for cash, which the leadership used to bail out struggling
militants in the volatile provinces of Diyala, Salahuddin and even Baghdad.

Looking at ISIS as a high-level crime syndicate in the
matter of its operating philosophy (as opposed to its core convictions centered
on establishment of a new “caliphate”) would explain some puzzling elements of
the group’s behavior, ones that don’t fit in with the usual perception of extremist,
caliphate-committed jihadist groups.

For one thing, ideological purity does not interfere too
much with operational opportunity.ISIS
is out to earn, increase its footprint, and magnify its clout.When ISIS is ready to roll somebody, it goes
ahead; but if the time isn’t ripe, it coexists.And, when it can gain the cover of a compromised local political machine,
it co-opts.

ISIS has made a big show of turning over the administration
of Mosul to its local Sunni allies; when the Baji refinery fell, ISIS announced
that local elements, not ISIS, would run it (though the decision to put some
distance between itself and an abandoned refinery with a giant bulls’ eye
painted on it might not be an instance of unalloyed ISIS altruism).

In northern Iraq, ISIS is happily collaborating with
ex-Baathists and Sunni tribal chiefs; in Syria, it is murderously muscling in
on the turf of fellow jihadis Jabhat al Nusra.It demonstrates its ideological rigor by massacring Christians and Shi’as,
the very groups it is trying to demoralize in its drive toward southern Iraq.

ISIS’ unwillingness to take it to the Assad regime has
opened ISIS to accusations that it’s in the pockets of the Syrian government
and Iran; however, ISIS’ forbearance may simply mean that it is waiting for the
right opportunity to make its move in Syria.

If, as per RAND via McClatchy, the group’s financial heart
is Mosul, that would explain the rapid takeover; ISIS was simply coming out of
the shadows to assert control of the city whose economic and political life it
already dominated.

The most interesting question, for Americans at least, is
how ISIS fits into the strategies and tactics of the Gulf States, particularly
Saudi Arabia.Is ISIS simply an
astoundingly successful local startup that is unilaterally driving the agenda
in Iraq; or is it an element in some Saudi strategy to confound Iran and the Shi’a
world?

Certainly, Saudi Arabia seems pretty happy with ISIS’
challenge to the Maliki government.But
whether ISIS is simply another Gulf-funded jihadi shop is open to question.

RAND analysts assert that ISIS received only 5% of its
funding from the Gulf, and draw the inference that Gulf influence and control
is not decisive.

This doesn’t quite
make the case—despite the palpable desire of the Saudis to rebut Iranian and
Iraqi accusations that ISIS is bankrolled by the Gulf--since the records only
go up to 2010, when ISIS was more of a struggling startup and had yet to come
under the leadership of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.Who knows, maybe with the acquisition of Baghdadi’s top-flight
management skills, ISIS became eligible for a round of angel financing from
well-heeled jihadi VCs in the Gulf.

It does seem that ISIS, with its best-practices operational,
political, communications, and business strategy seems more sophisticated than
anything the sclerotic Saudi security establishment could come up with on its
own, or even with the eager advice of Israel.

However, I speculate that there is a collaboration going on
between ISIS and Saudi Arabian security elements, but one that is initiated and
to a certain extent controlled by ISIS, rather than the other way around.Saudi Arabia, in other words, is just another
big player in the Middle East to be wooed, threatened, and exploited by ISIS as
circumstances dictate.

Anbar sheiks and local Ba’athists have, I would expect, a
pretty clear-eyed understanding that ISIS will treat them well only as long as
it is in ISIS’ interests to do so.Al
Qaeda in Iraq, after all, became an onerous and resented burden in Anbar, which
the sheiks were able to shed through the “Anbar Awakening” i.e. death squads a
go go a.k.a a JSOC/Sons of Iraq joint operation.

So I speculate that the cooperation of local non-jihadist
anti-Maliki Sunnis with ISIS is predicated on the understanding that Saudi Arabia is
condoning and endorsing the ISIS campaign, with the idea that once a “government
of national unity” i.e. government with a Sunni veto is installed in Baghdad,
or the whole country just fragments into de facto and increasingly de jure
Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish zones, the Gulf states will step up in financial and
security matters to avoid ISIS completely filling the resultant political and
economic vacuum.

In other words, I think Saudi Arabia may have funneled money
to ISIS as the “best of breed” jihadi startup, blessed the ISIS advance into
northern Iraq, maybe jumpstarted the instantaneous collapse of the Iraqi army
with some judiciously distributed bribes, and encouraged Sunnis in the
government to let the Maliki government twist in the wind.At the same time Saudi Arabia is abetting
ISIS’ operations, it has avoided endorsing ISIS as its creature, and is
reaching out to ISIS collaborators to assure them that there is an endgame
other than lonely subjugation to ISIS and its criminal exactions once the
situation in Baghdad shakes out.

As for the United States, the unhappy handwringing has not
been unexpected.Clearly, America wants
to see the twisted wreck of Iraq in its rearview mirror and doesn’t want to
have to return to the scene to bandage the bloody, wailing victims.

Nevertheless, the willingness of the Obama administration to
take time out to flay the Maliki administration for its amply-documented
political sins and push for a leadership change, instead of focusing on the
threat from an extremely successful black-flag waving/sectarian massacring ISIS
outfit is rather remarkable.

If the United States had any security role in the Middle
East beyond the “it’s the oil stupid” rationale, one would think it would
include supporting a secular democracy trying to forestall military conquest by
advocates of a fundamentalist caliphate.

The conspicuous lack of an Iraqi man on horseback capable of
uniting sects and ethnicities to protect the Baghdad government makes the
decision to overthrow the current man on horseback and hope for the best look
pretty dubious.The US “decapitate the
regime and everything will work out great” strategy has failed rather spectacularly
in 1) Saddam’s Iraq 2) Libya 3) Egypt 4) Afghanistan 5) Syria (still pending
but already FUBAR) does not quite vindicate the idea that, with its capital under threat, what Iraq
really needs now is a struggle to fill a power vacuum at the highest level of
government.

One can suspect that the US is not ready to take the
momentous step of openly backing Iran and Iran’s man (Maliki) in an Iraq clash
when Saudi Arabia and Israel obviously want things to go the opposite way.Supporters of this view—maybe some funded by
KSA, Israel, and the rest of the anti-Iran bloc, I dunno-- spend a lot of time
dumping on Maliki as the author of Iraq’s predicament, while trying—in a manner
I find rather unconvincing—to shoehorn ISIS into the “armed auxiliary of populist
uprising” narrative.

Well, I guess if Pravy Sektor can be spun as the midwife to
the birth of Ukrainian democracy, it’s not too much of a stretch to
characterize ISIS as the handmaiden of social and political justice in Iraq.

But at the same time, of course, the US tries to play on the
Iran side of the field—President Obama is, after all, still desperately attempting
to normalize relations with Iran, which is, sorry Israel, the only stable
democracy left standing in the Middle East—so Iraq gets 300 US advisors.

With the brave 300 comes, of course, the possibility of some
morale-boosting air strikes against ISIS, which is apparently a difficult nut for
the US to target even though its fighters are now driving Iraq Army-supplied
Humvees and tanks all over the barren, very barren, so very exposed landscape.

The China Hand crystal ball tells me that, as long as that
equipment is driving toward Syria, US targeteers, torn by the US policy of
supporting ISIS in Syria while griping on ISIS in Iraq, will encounter
insurmountable difficulty in identifying and destroying it.

In other words, maybe the United States, like every other
power in the region, is getting played by ISIS.Welcome to the club!